"I think it's quite a good doubling," O'Shea said on Wednesday before the play opened at the Playhouse, Canberra Theatre Centre for its Canberra season.

"They are supposed to be brothers, so there's that."

And, he said, both are father figures to Hamlet, so the audience gets to see the ways in which they influence him.

Hamlet, the Prince of Denmark (played by understudy Scott Sheridan on opening night, as lead actor Josh McConville was recovering from an injury), is mourning the death of his father who appears to him as a ghost and tells him to avenge his death. Claudius, he says, murdered him, married Gertrude (Doris Younane), his wife and seized the throne.

While this would seem to make Claudius a clear-cut villain, O'Shea said he wasn't so sure. He pointed out we don't know much about Hamlet's father: "We know he was away conquering other lands, but how present he was in Hamlet's life before, who knows?"

And while Claudius has selfish reasons for wanting Hamlet to get over the death of his father, he said, perhaps the new king was genuinely trying to keep it all together in a country beset by danger: Fortinbras of Norway, whose father was killed by Hamlet's father, is a very present threat. O'Shea said the production had a European feeling, with a mixture of languages and a set that combined old and new elements.

Matilda Ridgway, who plays Hamlet's former girlfriend Ophelia, said the merging of the personal and the political was very much a feature of Ryan's production, and her character was its greatest victim in an all too modern-world setting.

"Her father runs the secret service, she's constantly being overheard," she said.

Even her correspondence with Hamlet isn't private, and she is co-opted to help spy on him.

Hamlet, she said, was in part about "generation, regeneration and degeneration", and its main character, who finds himself under increasing strain as he tries to work out what to do, is very much a part of this.

"His misogyny is his greatest madness – he wants to stop reproduction altogether. Ophelia is the great hope of regeneration in the play."

But the forces overwhelming her become too strong.

Ridgway said she was playing Ophelia as a modern woman, fleshed out and not presented as though her descent into madness was inevitable.

"It robs the audience of the whole journey if she comes out and we're in fear for her. If we think there is hope for the future it's more tragic."

Hamlet is on at the Playhouse, Canberra Theatre Centre until October 24. Bookings: canberratheatrecentre.com.au.